2 Years of Spaghetti Code
Elle grieves about CSS and layout abominations, for whatever reason.
There has never been a time where we've wanted to rewrite something so badly. Unfortunately, that was the case with llia's site.
We used to have our main pseudonym be under llia, a shallow keysmash that started on a now-dead fediverse instance, and what we still publish our music under (technically under the jurisdiction of the Sylvester Sound Group of Laurel). There isn't any good history with it that I'm comfortable with mentioning, but I'm talking about its site, that damn thing.
Made in 2024, it was originally made in bare CSS and HTML—poorly made and all—and then sloppily ported to Eleventy by a then-SOTA GPT-5 because we didn't have any prior experience with SSGs (see here), and all of its shortcomings stayed with our mostly-manual porting to Astro. Completely horrible no-good bad, and every other site of ours that wasn't it was infinitely superior.
It had an absolutely atrocious aesthetic with bad contrast, as the colour scheme was yanked from a Mastodon bot that we can't find anymore; the sidebar image exists; everything that weren't the notices were hardcoded; and almost everything in the stylesheet was defined with pixel values, so it was completely unworkable. Plus the content contained within (particularly the about page). That's enough complaining for now, though...
the new layout 'n schtuff
Thanks to the efforts of Aspen, Flora, and yours truly, you and us musn't worry anymore, as the only efficient solution to that horseshit was to just trash it completely and make a new layout entirely. While it is marginally more subdued, and we did have to revamp the previous cover images to fit in, it's more managable and reflects our current selves better. AND we don't need our blog on Aspen's site anymore!
For one, we were less liberal with how we did things; while it was internally formulated before we did anything, we did an iterative approach so that it could actually be to standard (one person just did it in one shot for llia's site, whom we won't name). Secondly, the aforementioned blog is now directly integrated instead of being on a separate site; it was that way considering that it originally was hosted on Nekoweb, thus not easily updateable. And finally, its existence is no longer completely and utterly pointless.
If this feels more corporate or "professional": you aren't us and don't like what we like, so keep it. kthxbai
– DJ Big Schnasty